It was an electrifying time to be in China. The economy was opening up to Western businesses, and Chinese students flew off by the hundreds of thousands to get a first-class education in the United States. China’s burgeoning and largely uncontrolled internet was bursting with entrepreneurial talent. Despite the political pall that descended over the country after the 1989 crackdown, on a personal level Chinese people enjoyed freedoms unimaginable just a few years earlier. They were no longer tied to an assigned work unit and could instead work and shop where they wanted and marry whom they chose. Soon the country would join the World Trade Organization, and many hoped the economic liberalization would lead to demands for more political rights.

While McKinsey and its global clients expanded in China, the country’s human rights record drew international condemnation. China threw activists like the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo in jail, where he died. The Communist Party cracked down on any group that might pose a challenge to its rule. But people still hoped, as Clinton did in 2000, that China’s economic boom would eventually bleed over into the political sphere. In 2008, China hosted the Olympic Games. Tens of millions of young Chinese were discovering that they could voice their opinions on the country’s dynamic social media platforms. Relations between the United States and China, though often testy, were at times cordial.

One such program was the Belt and Road Initiative. Invoking the Silk Road, the caravan route of centuries past, the trillion-dollar plan sought to extend China’s influence by building ports, roads, bridges, railroads, and other projects across Asia, Africa, and beyond.

The plan quickly raised alarms in Washington and other Western capitals. Leaders feared China’s government would use the initiative as a stealth plan to expand its own military influence, to entrap poor nations by lending them money that they couldn’t repay, and to bind those nations in a Beijing-dominated sphere of influence. “These roads cannot be those of a new hegemony, which would transform those that they cross into vassals,” France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said on a visit to China.

In an authoritarian state like China, where police have few constraints and there is no rule of law, that sentence takes on a very different meaning than it would in London, Tokyo, or New York City. A report issued by a U.S. congressional panel on China said that Chinese security officials are using smart cities technology to “expand, improve, and automate information collection and analysis for mass surveillance.”